How We Unexpectedly Gained 20,000 DAU

The Power of Organically Exploding Viral Content

In January, installs in Uzbekistan suddenly jumped, followed by a spike in Ukraine in early February, and recently, a surge in Poland. Looking at the trend for Uzbekistan, the increase actually sustained itself quite well after the initial spike. At the time, I couldn't dig into it properly because I was buried in other high-priority initiatives, but seeing this trend pop up across multiple countries made me realize I needed to investigate. "Why on earth did our installs suddenly spike?"

What made you install the app? Tell us!

I decided to ask our users directly. I put up an in-app banner saying, "If you want a better Alarmy, submit your requests here!" and ran a simple survey. Nominally, it was a survey "for improvements," so I included questions about their satisfaction level. Practically, though, it was a survey to figure out their acquisition channel, so I made sure to include a question asking exactly where and what they saw before installing Alarmy. Since it was crucial to catch users before they forgot what prompted them to install, I put the banner up immediately without bothering to over-polish the questions. Over three days, we received 100 responses and were thankfully able to track down the source.

The Power of Viral Content: An Explosive Short-Term Install Boost

Out of 104 responses, 16 users shared a link from the exact same creator. It was a mix of YouTube and TikTok links, but they all pointed to the same creator's content. This content had hit 1.2 million views on TikTok and 150,000 views on YouTube. When I extracted the script and translated it, it wasn't sensational at all—in fact, it was more of a textbook, straightforward introduction to the Alarmy app. The creator didn't even have a massive following, yet the video racked up over a million views, which directly translated into this explosive install boost.

This doubled my conviction that our intense push for "creating viral hits" could play a core role in increasing installs. Since we haven't hit our first 1-million-view milestone for this quarter yet, I felt an even greater sense of urgency.

The Power of Viral Content: DAU Growth

As time passed, I checked to see how well this increased install volume was holding up. Along with that, I also checked how much the DAU in those countries had grown. Fortunately, all three countries are showing install numbers higher than their previous baselines, and their DAU has also seen a significant increase compared to before. In Poland's case especially, the absolute volume of growth was so large that it actually bumped up the country's tier ranking within Alarmy. This even led us to provide native Polish translations, which we hadn't supported in the app before. With this in place, our D1 retention will become even more solid, and the contribution of this new influx to our DAU growth will only increase.